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  “Over here,” Leon said and sprinted to the corner. A quick drop in vantage point indicated that he’d gone into a crouched stance, the better to hide from snipers on other rooftops, and then he peered out into the fictional night.

  “Where’s the spawn point,” I asked. “And is that the base for CTF?”

  “Down that street there.” He launched a glowing purple blob that I was fairly sure was intended to be a plasma grenade. It arced out into the dark, then landed with a boom to emphasize his point. “But you can see that while it looks like there’s two ways out, there’s all sorts of problems with it.”

  I nodded. “You can drop grenades on it from here, for one thing. And I’m assuming you can get up on those other buildings?”

  “Some of them. Plus, if you look down the secondary access route, you’ll see the next problem.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I could see at once what he was talking about. The side alley that led away from the spawn point did so in a long, straight line. At the far end, overturned vehicles and a dumpster had been set up in such a way as to provide superb cover. Anyone coming out of the base and down that alley was going to get taken apart like funnel cake. And, depending on the game settings, they might just spawn right back in there and have to do it again.

  “Not fun,” he agreed. “Got any suggestions?”

  I thought for a minute. “Move the spawn point to a rooftop, say, that one.” I pointed at the tallest building on the screen. “Put two fire escapes on it—we’ve got the objects, right—and maybe build the interior as well, so you have multiple routes in and out.”

  “Mmm. Maybe not on the last. That building’s just a frame—we’re talking a lot of polys to make the interior anything more than a staircase and a lot of locked doors.”

  “It’s occluded. It’ll be fine.”

  He grunted. “That’s what you creative types always say. Hmm. That building there might work.”

  I shook my head. “Too short. You can rain down fire on the rooftop from there, there, and there. So maybe no interior, but put a walkway across to another roof or two and spread some occlusion around the base of the building so that there aren’t a lot of direct lines on the fire escapes.”

  Leon nodded his approval. “Though we’ll need cover on those fire escapes—it’s a long run down, and stairs are always a bitch.”

  “Details, details,” I said. “Shoot me the name of this map so I can write up the proposal and…wait a minute, what’s that?”

  “What’s what?” With business concluded, Leon had gone into zoom mode, looking through a scoped and magnified view for targets. One was in his crosshairs now, a humanoid figure in gleaming armor with a massive helmet and an equally massive gun. As I watched, it belched green fire at an unseen target, accompanied by a faint sound of bacon frying.

  “Not the guy. Behind him.” I moved around Leon’s chair and leaned in close. “Do you see it?”

  The figure sprinted off to the left. Where he’d stood, I could see a pulsating blue box, resting on the sidewalk. Crackling fingers of electricity wrapped themselves around it and played down into the gutter. Then there was a purple flash and the sound of an explosion. The image of the box was replaced with a wildly cartwheeling view of sky and building, mixed with a sickening sense of vertigo as Leon’s avatar went spiraling toward the ground. It hit with a wet thud, and the screen faded to black. Up top, the letters told us what we already knew: Shadoo killed D3XTER. Across the room, a war-whoop rang out. Shadoo—one of the new guys we’d hired on to make deadline—had finally killed someone besides himself.

  “Shit,” Leon said, and leaned back in his chair. “And I’m out of respawns, so we can’t go back and look at whatever you were trying to show me. At least, not until the next round. What were you looking at, anyway?”

  I frowned. “I thought I saw something right past where that guy you were scoping was standing. It was supposed to be an ammo box, I’m pretty sure, but the model was wrong.”

  Leon grinned. “And that’s what you’re worked up about? The wrong model? Bug it in the database and move on, my friend. We’ve got way bigger problems than that.”

  “It’s not the fact that it’s the wrong model…,” I started to say, then trailed off. “Has the replay feature been implemented yet?” I asked instead.

  Leon pursed his lips. “I think so. You want me to pull this one to see if I can spot your magic box?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Pull it, save it, and dump it to my In/Out. I want to take a closer look at this thing if I can.”

  He shrugged again. “You’re the boss, more or less. You should have it in twenty minutes.”

  “Beautiful,” I said, and walked off. Behind me, the chaos of battle slowly receded.

  Chapter 11

  Half an hour later, Leon knocked on my door.

  “Come in,” I told him. “It’s open.”

  He was already halfway through. “I figured, but I wanted to be polite. The video capture of the replay is in your shared folder. Pull it up. I want to see what you’re talking about.” He flung himself into the spare chair I kept in the corner, then walked it over behind my desk with his feet.

  I’d already found the file by the time he stopped thumping the chair legs against the floor, and clicked on it to open it. “Jesus, that’s big.”

  “It was a long match,” he said, unapologetic. “I tried to trim it down for you a bit. That’s what took so long.”

  “No worries. Now let’s see what we’ve got.” We both sat there for a moment, waiting for the playback to catch up to the frame I was looking for. Game footage scrolled past, kills and near-misses and explosions galore.

  “There.” I clicked the pause button. “You see it?”

  Leon peered in. “Behind the character model?”

  “Yeah.” I tapped the screen with a pen. “You can see some of the particle effects over the shoulder here, and there.”

  He frowned. “Could be. Advance it frame by frame?”

  I nodded and started the slow playback. With agonizing deliberateness, the figure onscreen stopped, turned, and then strode away, leaving behind it….

  “There!” I shouted. “You see it? There!” I froze the image onscreen.

  Leon sat back in his chair. “Son of a bitch, you were right. That’s an ammo re-supply box from Blue Lightning.”

  Almost unconsciously I wiped my forehead. “Shit. I was getting worried that I’d been seeing things.”

  “Nope, that’s definitely an immigrant from the other asset list. Good eye, Cap’n.”

  He stood up, stretched, and stared suspiciously at the screen. “That’s going to have to come out before the next build, I think.”

  “The real question is, how did it get in there.” I frowned, thinking about what I’d seen and what it implied.

  “Shit, that’s easy.” His face showed relief. “Some smartass artist stuck it in as an Easter egg thinking we wouldn’t notice. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out who did it, and it’ll get pulled out without any hassle.”

  I looked up at him, not smiling. “I’m not sure that’ll take care of things. I don’t know if you saw it, but it looked like the object swapped in during the play session.”

  The wave I got was dismissive. “That’s impossible. The engine doesn’t support on-the-fly switching. You’re dreaming, man. Come on, there’s no need to go all Scooby Doo on something like this.”

  “Fine,” I said and spread my hands. “Tell you what—re-run the sequence and tell me when you start to see the SFX. Then tell me if the box was there all along or if it just swapped in after we started looking at it.”

  “I will,” he said. He grabbed the mouse. “Let me just rewind…hey, hang on there….”

  Onscreen, the image had frozen. Despite Leon’s frantic zig-zagging of mouse against mouse pad, nothing on the monitor was moving.

  “Locked up,” I said. “I’ll reboot.” I hit Control-Alt-Delete, waited a moment, and did it again. Nothing happened.r />
  “Need to cold boot,” Leon offered, and reached under the desk to hit the power button. There was a brief, spitting, sparking noise, and the screen went black. A familiar whiff of burned peanut butter wafted up, and a thin stream of smoke trickled out of the back of the monitor.

  “Oh, man,” he said, and stepped back, dismayed. “What the hell is going on here?”

  “You owe me a monitor,” I told him. “Screw it. I’m getting out of here for the night.”

  His glance went from the screen to me and back again, his expression worried. “Yeah. Just make sure the fire’s out before you go. And, uh, don’t let anyone else see the monitor before you trash it.”

  “Why not?” I asked, but he was already headed for the door. I watched him go, then looked back at the now-broken screen.

  Etched into the glass were a series of jagged lines, emanating from a central shape that could have been a box of some sort. If you looked at them long and hard enough, they sort of looked like lightning.

  * * *

  “You need to stop downloading so much porn.” That was Dennis’s take on the broken monitor when he ambled in to take a look at it. He spun the broken flat panel around on my desk, cocked his head, looked at it for a moment, then whistled. “Seriously, what did you do to this thing?”

  “I played the build,” I said. “No, scratch that—I played some captured video footage from the build.”

  “Huh.” He scratched his head.

  “New tat there?” I asked. He nodded and grinned like a madman, then shoved a meaty forearm underneath my nose. A stylized whale in dark blue ink stared up at me with a huge, empty eye. The tail curved around past Dennis’ elbow and vanished, not that I was terribly eager to see where it went.

  “Yeah. Salish Indian design. I saw it online and it sort of spoke to me, you know? Figured it was maybe my totem animal talking. But you don’t care about that, you care about what happened to your monitor.”

  I did my best rueful grin. “Sorry, man. I’d love to talk about the ink, but duty calls.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know.” The arm, complete with whale, retracted, and he started disconnecting cables from the back of the equipment. “No two ways about it, this thing is totally fried. Good thing you were still under warranty.”

  “Any idea what happened to it?”

  Instead of answering, he ducked under my desk and continued disconnecting the dead flatscreen from my tower system. “I think,” and there was a grunt and a pause, “that you maybe got some kind of power surge,” another pause, another grunt, “and the thing just ate itself.” His head popped up over the desktop. “Man, you’d better hope nobody walks in right now.”

  Despite myself, I chuckled. “Everyone knows you’re irresistible, Dennis. They’d just be surprised it wasn’t me under the desk, blowing you to get better gear.”

  “Hah! Good one!” He disappeared again, only to re-emerge with a clutch of cables in his fist. “Old school CRT, generally you got something like this by switching resolutions a lot. An old monitor just couldn’t take it, and you’d end up blowing it out. A lotta games did that, actually—fixed screen resolution for the shell UI, but once you went into gameplay, kablooey. I remember this one game I bought….” His voice trailed off into indecipherable mumbles.

  I leaned down in hopes of hearing him better. Dennis was talking under his breath now, fiddling with cables.

  “But that was a CRT, right? Antique. And this one was new?”

  He cocked his head. “New-ish. Like I said, it’s still under warranty. But honestly, this looks like it came from outside. We’d better get you a replacement monitor fast so we can see if your system got fried, too.”

  I groaned. “Don’t even say that. Do you have anything I can use?”

  Dennis stuffed the cords into a pocket of his jeans and hefted the dead monitor. “I think so. Just hang in and I’ll be back with something teevee-shaped.”

  “Okay.” He turned to go, and a sudden thought struck me. “Do you need to ship that back as part of the warranty?”

  He paused. “Eventually, but they’re always slow with the shipping labels. Could be a couple of weeks. Why?”

  “No reason,” I said. “But if you could hold onto it for a while, I’d appreciate it.”

  “Sure, whatever,” he said and ambled into the hall. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  “Not going anywhere, my man,” I told him. “Just bring me back something nice.”

  “Yeah, good luck with that,” he called back. A couple of steps and he vanished around a corner, though I could still hear his voice as he held court, explaining to all and sundry that I’d managed to destroy another piece of equipment.

  The explanation he offered seemed sensible, and as such, was tempting. We got power surges all the time, the result of operating in an area where thunderstorms and massive construction combined to make brownouts and power surges near-daily occurrences.

  Sensible also meant that I could stop poking at this, and get back to my job of delivering a working, fun game to BlackStone instead of chasing phantoms. All in all, it definitely seemed to have some benefits.

  My new phone buzzed. I swiveled in my chair to pick it up. “Yello.”

  “Green,” said Sarah, giggling. “Seriously, though, honey, do you really need to answer the phone like that at the office? What if it’s someone expecting something a little more…professional.”

  I closed my eyes and counted to three—slowly, and in Spanish—before answering. “Honey, we have entire company meetings in fake pirate-speak. The guy who’s fetching me a new monitor lets the spirits tell him what to draw on his arms, and we had four guys come in last month dressed appropriately for Internet No-Pants Day. I don’t think anyone’s going to mistake this place for a button-down office any time soon.”

  “Not now,” she said primly, “but someday. Just wait. I’ll make a million dollars here, then buy Eric out and fire you so you have to spend all your time at home peeling grapes for me.” I opened my mouth to say something, but she’d already moved on. “Are you coming home soon?”

  I gave a silent prayer of thanks for getting an easy question this time. “Yes. My monitor just blew up, so we’re going to put a replacement on to see if anything got lost. Then I’m coming home.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. I could imagine a different set of mental gears clicking into place before she spoke next. “It’s not going to make a difference whether you check now or in the morning, is it?”

  “It might,” I said gently. “If the system is fried, too, then Dennis can start fixing it tonight.”

  “Dennis should go home once in a while.”

  “Dennis sleeps here half the time because he lives out in East Assburger and he gets connectivity at the office for playing Guild Wars.” We’d had this conversation at least a half-dozen times, mostly in private, usually ending with “Poor Dennis. You should invite him over for dinner some time.” “Besides, with any luck, everything will be fine, and both he and I can get out of here soon.”

  I paused and thought about going home on time. “I really want to get home and see you,” I added, and meant it.

  “Good.” There was a wistful note of satisfaction in her voice. “If you get home early enough, maybe we could watch a movie. There’s stuff here from NetFlix with dust on it.”

  “We switched to NetFlix digital two years ago,” I said before I could stop myself, then continued. “I’ll call you once I get on the road. It shouldn’t be long.”

  “You’d better,” she said, but there was no heat in it. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” I said, and cut the connection.

  Dennis peeked around the corner of my doorway. “Trouble?”

  I grinned, or at least made the attempt. “For a change? Naah. Come on in.”

  “Today’s your lucky day, man.” He leaned back, out of sight, then emerged, staggering under the load of a massive black CRT monitor. “Twenty-three inches, and it
’s all yours—at least until I can replace the other one.” With a creak of straining plastic, he set it down on the desktop.

  I peered at it. So help me, the blank, unpowered screen looked like it was staring back at me. It was huge, deep enough to cover the entire desktop and tall enough to hide behind. At the top of the frame, where the manufacturer’s logo should have been, someone had planted a puffy sticker of one of the Powerpuff Girls.

  “Does it work?” I asked dubiously. “What’s that thing made out of, dinosaur bones?”

  He shook his head and grinned expansively. “Naah. It’ll do you just fine until we can order you a new one. In the meantime, try not to peel off Buttercup. I know it’s tempting, but leave her be.”

  “If you say so.” I nabbed a tissue from the box on my desk and wiped the screen down. Thick dust came away as I cleaned it, giving me vague hope for the picture quality. Meanwhile, Dennis had crawled under the desk with power cord and video cables in his hands. “Let me plug this into your system first. Then I can handle the power cord and get a look at your UPS while I’m down here.” He coughed. “Remind me again why you’ve got a laptop and a desktop?”

  “Because the laptop can’t play games for shit. At least, not according to you, the last time I asked, and because I can’t take the tower on the road with me.”

  There were thumping sounds, and abruptly the indicator light on the side of the titanic monitor flickered from dead to amber. Another minute, and it flashed green.

  “So I’m the asshole,” I heard Dennis say. “Serves me right.” He stood, a fine coat of white dust on his hands and in his hair. “You’re good to go. Just don’t blow this one out, too, all right? At least not until I can get your replacement in.”

  “No worries and no resolution shifts,” I told him. “I’m going to live in low-resolution land until you get me my new 36 incher.”

  He gave a short bark of laughter. “You don’t have to go that far, but don’t go too crazy. I don’t have any more monitors back there except some dinky-ass seventeen inchers than run on coal.”